Event

Bisbee '17 @ 27th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival

(Robert Greene, U.S., 2018, 112 min.)

Bisbee 17 by Sundance award-winning director Robert Greene, who teaches documentary at the University of Missouri is set in Bisbee, Ariz., an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border. Radically combining documentary and genre elements, the film follows several members of the close-knit community as they collaborate with the filmmakers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bisbee Deportation, where 1,200 immigrant miners were violently taken from their homes by a deputized force, shipped to the desert on cattle cars, and left to die. As the 100th anniversary of Bisbees darkest day approaches, locals dress as characters on both sides of the still-polarizing event, staging dramatic re-creations of scenes including a musical number from the escalating miners strike that led to the Deportation. The New York Times writes: Even though Bisbee 17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive.

With director Greene.

Shows with the short Ashlock (Elliott Geolat, U.S., 2018, 15 min.): Based on a true story of a troubled marriage and a miners strike, this narrative dance film is set in the Old Lead Belt of Missouri. With director Geolat.